Salman Rushdie Midnight's children Salman Rushdie Midnight's ...

cafe, I have returned to sit in my nocturnal pool of Anglepoised light wit
h only a cheap transistor for company. A hot night; bubbling air filled wit
h the lingering scents of the silenced pickle vats; voices in the dark. Pic
kle fumes, heavily oppressive in the heat, stimulate the juices of memory,
accentuating similarities and differences between now and then… it was hot
then; it is (unseasonably) hot now. Then as now, someone was awake in the d
ark, hearing disembodied tongues. Then as now, the one deafened ear. And fe
ar, thriving in the heat… it was not the voices (then or now) which were fr
ightening. He, young Saleem then, was afraid of an idea the idea that his p
arents' outrage might lead to a withdrawal of their love; that even if they
began to believe him, they would see his gift as a kind of shameful deform
ity… while I, now, Padma less, send these words into the darkness and am af
raid of being disbelieved. He and I, I and he… I no longer have his gift; h
e never had mine. There are times when he seems a stranger, almost… he had
no cracks. No spiders' webs spread through him in the heat.
Padma would believe me; but there is no Padma. Then as now, there is hunger
. But of a different kind: not, now, the then hunger of being denied my din
ner, but that of having lost my cook.
And another, more obvious difference: then, the voices did not arrive throu
gh the oscillating valves of a transistor (which will never cease, in our p
art of the world, to symbolize impotence ever since the notorious free tran
sistor sterilization bribe, the squawking machine has represented what men
could do before scissors snipped and knots were tied)… then, the nearlynine
yearold in his midnight bed had no need of machines.
Different and similar, we are joined by heat. A shimmering heat haze, then
and now, blurs his then time into mine… my confusion, travelling across the
heat waves, is also his.
What grows best in the heat: cane sugar; the coconut palm; certain millets
such as bajra, ragi and jowar; linseed, and (given water) tea and rice. Our
hot land is also the world's second largest producer of cotton at least, i
t was when I learned geography under the mad eye of Mr Emil Zagallo, and th
e steelier gaze of a framed Spanish conquistador. But the tropical summer g
rows stranger fruit as well: the exotic flowers of the imagination blossom,
to fill the close perspiring nights with odours as heavy as musk, which gi
ve men dark dreams of discontent… then as now, unease was in the air. Langu
age marchers demanded the partition of the state of Bombay along linguistic
boundaries the dream of Maharashtra was at the head of some processions, t
he mirage of Gujarat led the others forward. Heat, gnawing at the mind's di
visions between fantasy and reality, made anything seem possible; the half
waking chaos of afternoon siestas fogged men's brains, and the air was fill
ed with the stickiness of aroused desires.
What grows best in the heat: fantasy; unreason; lust.